Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Sunday, April 30, 2006

Monday, May 1: Contest w/Free Copies of Management by Baseball book at InBubbleWrap

The business-book site, In Bubble Wrap runs daily prize give-aways featuring a business book. Monday May 1, the featured book will be my new Management by Baseball: The Official Rules for Winning Management in Any Field. So if you register there and enter, you have a chance to win a free copy of it.

In Bubble Wrap is a fun-oriented project of 1-800-CEO-READ, which as of today (April 30) has the book in their catalog but is not selling it yet -- the work isn't available for purchase until Tuesday May 2, so perhaps their catalog page will change then.

Given the in Bubble Wrap guy's Garrison Kiellor Meets Gorman Thomas world-view/sense-of-whimsy, the Monday contest could be even more fun than the book.

4/30/2006 03:39:00 PM posted by j @ 4/30/2006 03:39:00 PM

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Red Sox' Bane: Diffusion from Softball to Baseball, There's Method to This Maddon

The Tampa Bay Devil Rays' new manager Joe Maddon hasn't even
gotten a quarter into the season before he's provided a set of
outstanding Management by Baseball lessons to his peers outside
the game. He's adapted a 10-fielders-a-side softball scheme for
placing his defense in trying to cope with the monster hitting
ability of Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz (as of today, tied
for 2nd in his league's home run table). Thanks to Erik Hansen of Tom Peters' site for coming up with the pointers.

There are a ton of crunchewy bits in his recent move. Maddon
has come to this because he's a student of metrics. Anaheim
Angels' manager Mike Scioscia his former boss, told me Maddon was
that team's dugout data guy, and his recent non-conformist
process confirms that for me.

Some background on the innovation: Murray Chass wrote a nifty
article for today's New York Times, To Combat Ortiz, Just Add Outfielders,
discussing the move. Every paragraph is quotable here, a
useful part of the overall info, so I won't excerpt it here --
there's noting to leave out. Just read it; what I write here will
presume you're read it.

MADDON MBB LESSON #1 - USE DATA WHEN
IT'S AVAILABLE
As he says in the article, Maddon uses "spray charts"
like the one here on this page. They show where batted balls from
a specific hitter land. The example I'm using is clearly the one
Maddon looked at to deploy his "34" scheme, which he
named after an NFL defense arrangement.

Now look at the Times chart of the Devil Ray defense scheme.
Ortiz, a lefty who normally pulls the ball to right field does
hit a few outfield flyballs to left, but "nothing"
(just one exception) towards left field through the infield.
Leaving the 3rd sacker stationed there is like Starbucks putting
a Starbucks store inside Salt lake City's Mormon Tabernacle (a
waste of space for an asset that won't get anything hit its way).

When you match these two charts, it's pretty obvious the
deliverable (the fielding configuration) is fit, like a
Birkenstock, to the historical record (Ortiz' 2006 perfromance).

Why wouldn't a manager do this? he same reason
managers beyond baseball don't -- because it's not standard
operating procedure. Odd shifts, though rare, have been part of
the game for a long time -- the most famous being one the St.
Louis Browns deployed against another Boston Red Sox slugger, Ted
Williams (infield only, shifted around towards first base). But
Maddon has gone beyond that standard -- he's gone to softball
methods & created a clear fourth outfielder, and perhaps
another half-outfielder (in softball terms, a "rover")
out of one of his other infielders.

The definitive work on innovation makes it clear
that a lot of successful innovations (a lot of unsuccessful ones,
too) come from borrowing wholesale at first, then fine tuning, a
process from another discipline. Bringing together tools everyone
has but not everyone uses, with a classic innovation path
produces an experiment worth trying. Ortiz may adapt by starting
to hit the ball the other way (a guarantee of depriving
himself to a degree of the very thing that makes him so feared,
in exchange for the possibility of making it up
with a new technique). Maddon 1, Ortiz 0. It's always worth
considering analogically experimenting with a process innovation
from another field in your own -- it won't always work out (this
Maddon tweak may go away or stick), but you won't know unless you
try it.

MADDON MBB LESSON #2 - EXPERIMENT IN
CONTEXT
Maddon is not deploying the shift in every Ortiz plate
appearance. As he told Chass, they won't use the scheme when
there are runners on base (infielders have some responsibilities
for basrerunners) or when Ortiz comes to the plate with no outs
and fewer than two stikes (because Ortiz, as slow as he is, and
he's tectonic-plate slow, could conceivably beat out a bunt with
the Method to This Maddon defense on).

So the Rays are approaching this judiciously. They are
starting where it has the best chance to succeed -- against a
deadly opponent, in specific, lower-risk situations. And there's
another, related contextual factor that doesn't have anyhting to
do with the game on the field, so it becomes...

MADDON MBB LESSON #3 - "IF IT AIN'T
BROKE DON'T FIX IT" FAVORS THE BROKEN...
...when it comes to innovation, anyway. Chass even mentions this
explicitly in his article, saying the Yankees aren't likely to
try it no matter how much success Maddon has. Bceause the Yankees
are competitive with the Red Sox and a win in either direction
between them could make a big difference at the end of the year.
Maddon won't say this publically, I suspect, but I'll stick my
neck out an assert Maddon knows the Tampa Bay Devil Rays' 2006
championship hopes season won't hinge on the failure of a
fielding experiment against one batter or a dozen of them. The
Rays' best case is not, frankly, an AL East flag.

And that's liberating. Standard operating procedures don't
favor the Rays so the relative risk of innovation goes way down.
Maddon, like most baseball managers, is fearless enough to
innovate when the odds either work in favor of it or are unknown
but reasonably could work out in favor of it. ¿And if Maddon
can't innovate now, where there's so little to lose
(strategically), how can he ever hope to do it once the team is
established?

Beyond baseball, most managers fritter away their "First
100 days" trying not to offend or upset anyone or any
established norms, and that's a pitiful waste of a resource one
gets once and then is gone forever -- the ability to get
a little forgiveness. Finally, though, a caveat for Maddon and
for managers outside baseball in their enthusism to innovate
processes...

MADDON MBB LESSON #4 - DATA CAN LEAD YOU
DOWN BLIND ALLEYS IF YOU OVER-INTERPRET
When I spoke with Joe Maddon last November, I found he wasn't
really a numbers geek. Cognitively, more a "business
analyst" (numbers as means not ends) as opposed to a
"statistician" (the endorphins come from the numbers
themselves). That could work to his advantage or disadvantage in
this particular Ortiz/Method to This Maddon "34"
Defense because if he's only looked at David Ortiz' 2006 spray
chart and not previous ones, the Rays may be in for a little
sting themselves.

Look at Ortiz' 2005 spray chart hitting at his home
stadium. While there's still a predominance of the infield action
on the 1st base side, there are enough grounders to the
left-field direction to undermine the return on the new Maddon
tactic. If Maddon is lost in the romance of his new numbers, he
may have missed this. A good statistician would be careful about
putting too many eggs into a small basket of recent events, but
most statisticians aren't managers, responsible for acting, and
therefore forced to act before information with 99+% confidence
is available.

The great thing about baseball management, a lesson every
other single line of work beyond it could benefit from, is if
this scheme was deployed prematurely, Maddon will fix it, and
smartly. He won't throw it away entirely never to be considered
again. He'll erither adjust, or, if he takes it out of
circulation, he'll have it eternally in the back of his mind,
idling, waiting for a context in which it would again succeed.

DON'T GET MAD, GET MADDON
I urge you to set aside a little time to think about how you
could experiment in low-risk ways with processes that don't
currently work well. And follow Maddon this season, especially
early, in his "First 100 days". He's a pathfinder, a
manager with excellent emotional intelligence, an enthusiasm for
data combined with a mind that's pretty good at using it & a
massive dose of fearlessness.

How could your organization benefit from having a
manager like that?

4/27/2006 01:18:00 PM posted by j @ 4/27/2006 01:18:00 PM

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

MBB in Fast Company

I spent almost a full day talking with Fast Company staff writer Michael Prospero in Peoria (Arizona) in early March. He's a really sharp guy and we had a good time.

The product was this article in Fast Company. He asked some questions and covered some ground never covered here.

4/25/2006 08:30:00 AM posted by j @ 4/25/2006 08:30:00 AM

Friday, April 21, 2006

Corporations' executive teams like to shell out their shareholders' money for the
rights to name almost everything related to baseball. We have
stadia like Enron Field. We have the In n' Out Burger Seventh
Inning Stretch. We got the 2nd National Trust of Marshallton
Bring in The Reliever golf cart. We haven't yet bar-coded the
radio color-man and sold him off ("Here's The Citibank
Ralph Kiner Postgame Interview"). But my astute colleague
Martin Marshall sent me one of those classic apocryphal internet
messages because it had
great Management by Baseball lessons in it.

It was an epiphany. Because this "Stupidity in
Action" message contained what were allegedly the top ten
"Dilbert Quotes," stupid things managers said. Since
the boneheads' corporate affiliations were made explicit, I think
each of these sayings give the corporate owner naming rights over
a classic baseball blunder.

How about...

THE UNITED
PARCEL SERVICE FAILURE TO FLEX SELF-IMMOLATION HABIT

Dilbert award winner from an alleged UPS
manager: This project is so important we
can't let things
that are more important interfere with it.

Gene Mauch is one of the most respected, and
least successful baseball managers of the second half of the
twentieth century. He was respected, because he knew what all the
moves were and how to make them. He was a great role model for
many more successful followers. His limitation was, he didn't
flex much. "The Book" is heuristics, a flexible set of
guidelines, and Mauch just had his probability tables in his head
and followed them. After a while, other managers could predict
with very good certainty what Mauch would do, undermining his
effectivenes.

Most baseball managers, and the handful of really
good ones beyond baseball, react to system feedback. Most
managers would have realized they were being scoped out and they
would tweak their approaches to meet competitors' moves. Mauch
never let that get in the way of what he knew. One manager who
faced Mauch a bunch said he could play the man like a fiddle --
if he wanted to get rid of a certain pitcher early on, he'd put
up a specific pinch hitter, knowing Mauch would react just so. In
26 seasons, many of them for dreadful teams he inherited or for
an expansion franchise, Mauch made the playoffs twice. He was a
good sensible solid manager, but not a winner. Like UPS'
corporate flub dude, he never let more important things like
winning interfere with the core precepts he knew were really really
important to his own world view. That's why Gene Mauch
posthumously gets the United Parcel Service Failure-to-Flex
Self-Immolation Habit.

THE DELCO (DELPHI) WILLY-NILLY
QUALITY IS JOB #8 FAILED ONE-OUT STEAL OF HOME

Dilbert award winner from an alleged
Delco (Delphi) manager: Doing it right is no
excuse
for not meeting the schedule.

The Mariners' Michael Morse is one of the most
enthusiastic, aggressive players in the game. He's really fun to
watch. He plays with an almost-Cuban baseball joy and flair --
but unlike a Cuban player, without a shadow of a dream of a shred
of instinct for the task at hand. He runs the bases as though
speed in getting to the next base was the end in itself, not
being safe. I've seen him picked off, gunned down trying for the
extra base on a single, smoked trying to steal. He's comparable
to a really confused beer-league softball baserunniner in the
late innings after a feww to many brewskis. The thing is, for a
guy his size, he's kinda fast. He knows it. He likes it. He's
desperate to succeed. He simply has no idea how to do it right.

Goal oriented people who hate "the
process" can be effective as long as they are aiming at the
right goal and they don't let quality suffer more than the goal
can handle in the end. Like Michael Morse, the managers who sent
the Space Shuttle up in out-of-spec bad weather against the
objections of their scientists, ignoring the advice because they
were trying to privatize the program and needed an aggressive
schedule to prove its potential profitability, meeting the
schedule, not doing it right, became the goal. Morse, of course,
never killed anyone with his lack of acuity, the NASA managers
killed a bunch, as well as vaporizing assets worth hundreds of
millions of dollars and setting back their agency's program
several years.

So Mike, until you accidentally kill someone with
your Runaway Train routine, you are the proud recipient of the
Delco (Delphi) Willy-Nilly Quality is Job #8 Failed One-Out Steal
of Home nod.

AT&T "WE'RE
MANAGEMENT, WE CAN DO ANYTHING WE LIKE" LINEUP CARD CEREMONY

Dilbert award winner from an alleged
AT&T Long Lines supervisor:We know that communication is a problem, but
the company is not going to discuss it with the employees..

In the American League's 1940 campaign, the strong Cleveland Indians' squad had a real
martinet of a manager. Ossie Vitt was a good-field, no-hit third
baseman from the 1910's (a common model for that era that's
almost extinct now as a result of the livlier ball which
downplays the returns of buntng) who was in his third season. His
management theory was "If you don't have soemthing insulting
or cruel to say, don't say it".

In June, the team revolted and many, perhaps all
of the players on the squad (the story varies and an ugly
incident like this is bound to plaque up with apocrypha like a bad artery with cholesterol) signed a
petition to have Vitt removed. When the talent is the product,
and the talent's feelings are running strong, it pays in all
endeavors, not just baseball, to do what the talent wants. If
there's a clear right and wrong, you can make a decision based on
it. But when the core of a conflict is generational difference or
a matter of personal style, there is no right or wrong, only the
need to make the correct, highest-yield decision. Cleveland's
principal owner took the manager's side against most/all of the
talent because...well, hard to tell. From a management
perspective there's no rational reason. By reduction, one can
only assume it was one of those "we're management, we can do
anyhting we like" moments where people in power want to
impose their will on the talent because they can. In
Bradley's case, it went much farther. He enlisted the press in ad
hominem attacks on the players, and the writers who covered the
team labelled the individual players "crybabies". The
fans joined in with some McCarthyism of their own, using the term
the press had coined adding to the bad stress.

The team, surprisingly, didn't collapse. They
just started playing less well. Through June, they'd played 42-25
(.627 )ball and after June, with the "Crybabies"
harangue clanging in the papers and from the stands, they went
47-40 (.540), not a collapse, but just not good enough to stay
ahead of the Detroit Tigers who beat the Tribe out by a single
game. There's no mathematical proof the Indians would have won it
if Vitt had been replaced with an equally talented manager but
one without a behavior disorder. But it's been my experience that
shops with good talent working for non-communicative or martinet
managers always underperform at least a little, and I believe
there's a strong argument to be made that the 1940 Indians
without the quotidian barrage of ad hominem attacks would have
fared a game or three better, and maybe more.

When the talent is the product, it always
pays management to communicate with the talent, listen, respond,
and treat it with a modicum of respect (even on days it may not
have earned it). And even when the talent isn't the product, even
when "management" is the warden in the Red Chinese
prison factory where they made your DVD player, the treatment of
the captive labor "talent" is reflected in the
deliverable's quality.

It's less common than it was in 1940, but
allegedly at AT&T Long Lines, at least, The spirit of Ossie
Vitt is still alive. And for that, Ossie gets special mention
during the AT&T "We're Management, We Can Do Anything We
Like" Lineup Card Ceremony.

¿Got any Corporate Naming Rights you'd
like to see sold for Management by Baseball moments?

4/21/2006 01:43:00 PM posted by j @ 4/21/2006 01:43:00 PM

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Curt Flood: Doing The Right Thing As a CLM (Career Limiting Move)

In a healthy organization, managers who attempt to redress
long-standing "survivals" (behaviors or processes that
have been in place so long, they have become implicit and accepted
without examination) are allowed to question those survivals.

In truly unhealthy organizations the "normal"
managers will always measure the neener-neener factor (the
ability to bring down a potential rival by any means necessary)
as always outweighing the net benefit of retooling the
dysfunctional behavior.

And in the middle of the spectrum of health,
vaguely-functional organizations, the pattern is most often a
mixed model: The first and sometimes second person to challenge
the status quo is sacrificed on the altar of the Bitgods (the
"back in the good old days" crowd that assumes the
virtue of however it was done when they were cutting their teeth
on it has earned the credibility of one of the Ten Commandments),
but eventually, without ever admitting the sacrificial victims
were ahead of the game.

Baseball is in the middle of that spectrum. Sacrificial case
in point: Curt Flood.

Alex Belth's new book Stepping Up: The Story of Curt Flood and His
Fight for Baseball Players' Rights (Persea Books)
describes in great detail not only the causes and results, but
all the subtle factors that come into play and how the survival
is ultimately overcome. Stepping Up is a lot more book than that
-- it's a full life bio of Flood with good details of his playing
career. The player comes through well -- Belth is a capable
analyst who understand sabermetrics, but the most engaging aspect
of this book is the way Flood the human being comes through so
clearly. I almost felt like I had met him. It's a solid book,
very readable and informative, especially if you weren't watching
baseball on the field and in the courtrooms closely from the
1950s through the 1970s. It's not an uplifting Summer read like An Almost Perfect Game, but it's a serious
page-turner..

Note: If you want to read a concise remembrance of Flood's on-field career, Rich Lederer at Baseball Analysts wrote an
insightful overview.

FLOOD CONDITIONS
I'm not going to explain whyCurt Flood alone among his peers came into
baseball with an uncommon set of attitudes that would let him
view the reserve clause (that bound players to teams as long as
the teams chose with no employee recourse) as a form of slavery.
That's about sixty pages of the book. I'm simply going to explain
his action and the organization's response to him.

Flood was a veteran player who'd been drafted by the
Cincinnati Reds but traded to the St. Louis Cardinals while still
a rookie. He never took it well -- he viewed getting traded
without consulting him as tantamount to the Reds & cards
viewing him as a piece of property. He made a pact with himself
that if it happened again, he'd refuse it. Unlike a lot of people
who make pacts with themselves, he was stone-cold serious about
it (as this person of principle was with just about everything).
When in October 1969, the Cards traded him to the Phillies, and
to add insult to injury, the team's front office decided to have
a low-ranking staffer tell him after the fact, he decided not to
accept the trade. In the rules of baseball then, that meant
retirement, or, sometimes, a negotiation to get more money. Flood
retired and the Players' Association helped him sue Major League
Baseball to try to kill off (as an antitrust violation and as a
violation of the U.S. Constitution) the rules that allowed
baseball to behave that way. The case worked its way up the
judicial hierarchy until three years later when the Supreme Court
ruled 5-3 in favor of MLB.

Flood and the Players' Association didn't count on winning.
Flood just did it for the good of the system and because it was
the right thing to do for his honor, for the good of his fellow
players, and, ultimately, for the good of the system. He was
whacked around in the sports and business press like a Brian Mohler hanging breaking ball. He was
vilified as a man without principle, a guy who was posturing to
make more money (such antics had happened before). The Bitgods
saw overturning the MLB-labor status quo as scary. Front offices
were comfortable with the way things were...not only did it
anchor an asymmetry of power that benefited them, it was well
known, easy to work with and something they could about do in
their collective sleep (like so many processes beyond baseball,
eh?). For the team negotiators, it was somewhat about money, but
in most cases, it wasn't their money, it was the owners' money.
The core pain point for front office types was the inconvenience
of having to learn new ways to do things.

Organizations can be really effective at squashing advocacy
for change. They can pretend to know the results of change will
be destructively earth-shattering, and since there's no evidence
to the contrary (the change isn't implemented yet) nobody really
know what would happen "if". The dominant Bitgods can
enlist the people inside who would benefit from the change to
actually resist it through fear of worst case scenarios.
Overcoming traditions, even overtly dysfunctional ones, will face
resistance even from uninvolved parties (individuals who have no
stake in the outcome) who have such a neurotic fear of change
they will oppose the change even more violently than those who
have an actual stake in preventing it. In the Flood case, he
received death threats in the mail and on his locker, threats not
from the owners, but from the outside world, from people who were
not actual stakeholders.

Belth explains that in Flood's life, it turned really ugly.
While was prepared going in for the resistance he would face and
while he never thought he had made a mistake, it started eating
him up inside. Seemingly the worst pain came from the absence of
support from his fellow players. It wasn't that they opposed him
(a few, like Carl Yastrzemski, did), but the rest kept their
heads low, as Flood's road trip roommate Bob Gibson admitted,
because they didn't want the fallout to get them, too.

Three and half years later, the movement Flood took point on
won its big victory. In late 1975, an impartial arbitrator ruled
the reserve clause as written did not allow team's past
behaviors, and the change was effected. Flood never benefited
directly. He was out of baseball and would have been 38 years old
by then anyway and unlikely to have been an All-Star. But he knew
he had set in motion the chain of events that overturned a
dysfunctional survival.

BEYOND BASEBALL
This is quite common beyond baseball, though usually not as
well-reported or visible.

Managers who are getting a paycheck to work for an
organization owe their employer their best judgment and
the effort to act upon it. Managers in big organizations who do
this, though, in the face of survivals that are limiting the
organization's effectiveness, are usually sacrificed by the
Bitgods or political infighters the way Flood was. When I worked
at the InfoWorld Test Center, the reviews editors operated from
an old mandate that they should do as many reviews as possible,
regardless of quality. The founding mission of the Test Center
was to assure quality, so we always pushed back on quantity
demands that would violate minimum quality standards. The first
two Test Center directors were sacrificed by weak-minded and
weak-willed executive management that wasn't capable of defending
it's own stated mission. The next two were merely incapacitated
by the confusion. It was the fifth director who got it under
control, a control that never would have been possible without
the efforts of the first two and some of the efforts of the next
two.

The husband of a friend of mine works for a company where the
manufacturing facility's layout was designed by the owner's son
while the youngster was getting an MBA, seven years ago. It's
completely dysfunctional, costing the medium-sized company
human-hours, calendar-time, misplaced inventory, a few injuries
and a lot of bad morale. The owner has tossed a whole series (at
least three that I've heard of) operations managers who
immediately saw how deranged and inefficient the layout was and
wanted to change it, only to told they couldn't, but at the same
time held accountable for the results. Aztec Human Sacrifice
Time. The current operations manager just makes no waves and
points the finger at his employees for all shortfalls and wasted
costs.

Â¿Should YOU become a sacrifice, undermine your
career-potential in an organization to do the right thing? I
guess it depends on your circumstances, your job prospects
elsewhere, and how easy it is you find it to sleep at night
taking money from someone to undermine what's best for them. I do
know a lot of people who are comfortable following the pattern of
the operations manager who's survived by sluffing a sense of
responsibility. I'm just not sure I'd ever want any of them
working for one of my clients.

4/19/2006 02:36:00 PM posted by j @ 4/19/2006 02:36:00 PM

Saturday, April 15, 2006

"Jittery Jon" Daniels: A Texas Rangers Lesson in the Limits of Managerial Control

It's what you
learn after you know it all that counts -- Earl Weaver

When a manager starts a new job, especially a young manager,
it's important to listen to people, validate what can be fixed
quickly, grab control and apply one's vision clearly & con
brio.

When a manager gets instant good results, it's
exhilarating. But how about when the carefully-constructed plan's
early feedback is all bad?

There's a great baseball lesson for managers in all endeavors
in this first 10-days of the 2006 season, especially in the
struggle of the Texas Rangers. The Rangers went 2-9, and as written by Jim Reeves of the Fort Worth Star
Telegram (thanks to Baseball Think Factory):

Over the last two weeks,
since the day before the Rangers broke camp, Daniels has
watched helplessly as his No. 2 starter, Adam Eaton, was lost
for three to four months with a finger injury; his No. 5
starter surrendered a major league record six home runs in
his first game; his red-hot rookie second baseman dislocated
a thumb; his veteran closer blew a ninth-inning lead and his
team lost seven of its first nine games.

Oh, and did I mention that
the outfielder he traded a power-hitting second baseman for
was on a record-setting strikeout pace? Or that Robinson
Tejeda, the young pitching prospect who came to the Rangers
in the David Dellucci trade, has already been torched twice
at Oklahoma City? Or that Daniels' $60 million free-agent
pitching ace, Kevin Millwood, is off to an 0-2 start?

Daniels is under somewhat more scrutiny than most new GMs
would be. At 28 years old, he's chronologically young (probably
the youngest-ever) for the GM job. And while he has had solid
experience (multiple baseball jobs and in multiple franchises),
he appears to have had a significant promotion each of his five
years in the line of work, so to many observers, it would appear
to be a "groomed" situation. He got the job over a lot
of more senior men and women with a lot more years under their
belts, some of whom had been working on the staff of teams that
had made the playoffs (that is, demonstrably successful).

The expectations for the Texas Rangers this season were going
to guarantee a little extra heat. They play in a balanced
division with no dominant team meaning there's going to be
realistic hope every year. And after going from 71 wins in 2003
to 89 wins in 2004, they boinged back to 79 wins like a noisy
piece of over-flexed plexiglas in 2005. The 2004 campaign had
given fans a lot of hope in a team of youngish high-achiever
batters, somewhat fluffed up by a home park, The Ballpark in
Arlington, that enriches offensive events as much as any park in
the American League.

Reeves' impression is that Daniels is taking it really well,
considering.

When I found him Wednesday
before the Rangers and Angels wrapped up their three-game
series, surprisingly Daniels wasn't poised on the top row of
the upper deck at Angel Stadium, ready to take the plunge off
the other side. There was no arsenic or hemlock in sight, no
loaded firearm stuffed into his pants pocket.

The GM remains calm, lucid
and reasonably sane, even as the world he spent six months
constructing crumbles around him. {SNIP} Now Daniels' wife,
Robyn, who sat beside him during Tuesday night's
gut-wrenching, 5-4, ninth-inning loss and then flew back to
Texas on Wednesday, that's another story all together.

{SNIP} "She only sees
one side of it. She sees not just me, but [assistant GM] Thad
[Levine] and others, how much time and effort and work that
we've put in, and the sacrifices I make on a personal level,
and then to not be able to control the outcome, that's the
part that everybody struggles with, and that's the part she's
learning about right now." For the uninitiated, like the
wife of a first-time, first-year GM, it's a painful lesson in
realizing, once the season begins, just how little anyone,
even a sharp, eager and energetic general manager like her
husband, can actually control.

So what part of the decision does Daniels really own.
Well, the Millwood signing is his. The Adam Eaton acquisition was
his, too, but if Eaton's injury either cames with him
from his previous employer, the San Diego Padres, Daniels is not
on the medical team. Not his albatross technically, though if a
pattern emerges of medical misfeasance, he'd better recognize
that early. But his #5 starter blowing up and being left in the
game long enough to set a 21st century record for homers bounced
off his ERA is the manager's call, and most of the rest of it
"is just baseball". That is, random steps on the way to
an outcome that will just as easily be different as what it looks
like right now.

COLLECTING CALM
Daniels seems to have internalised one of the hardest lessons for
young managers -- that no matter how much skillful planning you
do and how much control you have over certain parts of the
process, other parts can just fall apart through lack of
competence or lack of decent luck. Luck, as Branch Rickey said,
is the residue of design, and he was right, but some systems are
so complex or just beyond any reasonable chance for a manager to
affect strongly that one can have what I'll call
"bad luck" that's not one own fault. So, it appears,
Daniels understands he'll last longer and make decisions as long
as he doesn't feel like he owns all the flaws and bumps
in the road. At the same time, btw, he needs to publicly take
the hit for anyone else in the organization who might have been
responsible -- you protect the people who work for you at least
in the public eye and up the hierarchy, unless you have a strong
reason to believe they did it on purpose.

He has, of course, internalised a second lesson, a lesson
everyone in baseball but the early George Steinbrenner has
successfully internalised: You can't let the first ten games of a
season instill panic in you -- while there's much to observe, the
heuristic of the overall solution can't be settled out yet.

BEYOND BASEBALL
That second lesson is one every organization beyond baseball
would profit from internalizing. I've seen panic set in with
managers running big initiatives who find glitches in early
efforts. Baseball, of course, is much better at pairing on-going
experimentation/pilot-testing with progressing on actual
projects. All successful baseball managers and many of the
ordinary one know you have to test rigorously before you commit
all your resources to one approach, all your at bats from a
position to one young player.

Beyond baseball, managers need to be experimental early on
with less life-&-death aspects of projects and jobs, as well
as open to feedback. It's a little less incompetent than it was a
decade ago, but I'm still amazed at the number of executive teams
that take on mission-critical initiatives with running a pilot
test of key components at the beginning.

But it's the first lesson that's a tough struggle, especially
if one's management success has come from organizing and forging
improvements. I know a hundred self-inflicted Mr. Bill Haircuts, related to needing to be
resigned to the limits of one's control. I'll give you my own Mr.
Bill Haircut moment with it, and I wasn't even very young at the
time. I was working at a software company, a director running
most of the marketing functions, and sales were flagging. Changes
in the market were eroding the utility of the very wonderfully
executed traditional channels and sales techniques. Sales were
down a little, margins down sharply, and margins were the
lifesblood of this company. Sales, run by someone smart but
fearful and inexperienced, didn't want to try anything different,
she just wanted to drive her people harder. So I came up with the
idea of an Integrated Marketing (targeted print advertising +
targeted mailings to segmented lists 'o readers + telephone sales
pitches soon after the mail piece arrived) program I could run
out of our departments to peddle our highest priced, highest
margin luxury item. The software suite was still getting
finishing touches, but what a super way to launch it into the
market. The program worked like a perfectly-executed hit-and-run
-- the talent in this marketing department was outstanding, our
planning was clean and the staff implementation was nothing less
than brilliant. The conversion rate was breathtaking.

Just one tiny little wafer-thin dinner mint of a problem. The
product we were selling was buggy, so we could either ship crap
(fine for a big company like Microsoft or Ford, fine for a
politically-connected military supplier), or delay shipping, taking the wind
out of the sails the program had built up and the margin out of
the company's (thinning) coffers. When we launched the integrated
marketing program, we didn't know the software was going to be
intractably buggy, and had we waited for shipment, it would have
undermined the power of the plan. As it turned out, we cancelled
all the transactions and (ultimately) the product was quietly
killed. With 20-20 hindsight, I know we shouldn't have launched
the program whose very success made for an ugly mess. That said,
though, the exact failure points were beyond our control. That
said, it was my responsibility.

You can't own everything emotionally. It's too early
for Jittery Jon Daniels to judge whether his moves worked out or
not. Managers in and beyond baseball have to own up to failures
and learn from them without owning them emotionally. Embracing
them will only diminish the manager's ability to attack the next
project/season/initiative/change aggressively. The focus for
the young GM and for us should not be what the Rangers record is
today, but what Jon Daniels learns from what's happened before.

4/15/2006 02:41:00 PM posted by j @ 4/15/2006 02:41:00 PM

Saturday, April 08, 2006

There's a trend in MLB, in part because of the trophy-winning
2005 campaign of the "character"-rich Chicago White
Sox. That rage is an attempt to emulate the winners' focus on
what that organization defines as character, and character is a
very slippery object to define. In the ethnically-Albanian parts
of Yugoslavia, the thicker a woman's moustache, the more
character she was perceived as having. At the early Microsoft,
the volume of character you were thought to have was directly
proportional to the amount of unpaid overtime you worked.

For the porpoises of this entry, I'll simplify what baseball
considers character: a Three Musketeers
all-for-one-and-one-for-all set of conduct, a positive work ethic
that recognizes hierarchical authority lines and an ability to be
fan/community-friendly.

SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF A FRANCHISE
Each franchise will define character a little differently.
Evaluation will be different in each organizations, too. Some will
try to measure, the way the Colorado Rockies do, with the aid
of testing. Others will just collect scouts' unrigorous
observations.

There's no doubt attitude and personality make or break teams
and non-baseball organizations are subject to the exact same
gravitational fields. People evaluating baseball teams'
competitive standings will frequently forget these, especially if
the evaluators play Rotisserie or Strat-O-Matic-style simulations
where individual personality and group dynamics are missing
(almost completely) from the outcomes that establish the
probabilities of winning or losing. Beyond baseball, too many
managers pick one of the binary choices: they ignore character
because they can't measure it easily, or they allow it to
dominate their hiring decisions too much, and as I've explained
before, binary decisionmaking is Russian Roulette with
Five Bullets.

A recent nifty Amy Joyce story in the Washington Post
presents a lot of the research that shows that amiability in the
workplace -- the factor I believe most often gets equated to
"character" beyond baseball -- is strongly valued in
hiring, in promotions, and in how hard employees will toil for a
boss. Go read it, but here's an important extract:

According to a Harvard
Business School study released last summer, people choose
work partners based on, naturally, their competence on the
job but, more notably, on their likability.

The study, which surveyed both managers and regular
employees, broke these criteria into four categories of
people: the competent jerk, who knows a lot but is unpleasant
to deal with; the lovable fool, who doesn't know much but is
great to have around; the lovable star, who's both smart and
likeable; and the incompetent jerk (do I even need to describe
that one for you?).

The majority of respondents, of course, said they wanted to
work with the lovable star, according to the research. When
managers were asked which choice they would make in hiring
and promotion, they said competence always trumps likability.
But the research showed the opposite was true. "We found
that if someone is strongly disliked, it's almost irrelevant
whether or not she is competent; people won't want to work
with her anyway," said the authors, Tiziana Casciaro and
Miguel Sousa Lobo, in their research paper. "By
contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out
every little bit of competence he has to offer."

(Go on, you've done it: "But he's SUCH a nice guy. Do we
really have to fire him? He was really good on that project
seven years ago.")

Here's the thang -- while "character" is a
completely viable approach to building winning teams in baseball
or beyond, there are a million ways to fail and only a few ways
to succeed. Here are the challenges:

(1) Because character is not an either/or factor.
There is a continuum of behaviors each individual holds, so to
measure character requires one to measure shades of gray -- with
various tints. Character has some context, so different
components have different meanings. Let me give you an extreme
example because it's so easy to see the complexity in it -- but
realize that in organizations with less extreme ways of being, it
may be harder to break out pieces of behavior and decide what the
critical factors are.

One of my godsons, The Big Train, was selling mortgages for
one of the bigger national operations (its totally unmemorable
name has the prefix "Ameri" but there are several and
I've forgotten the suffix). The basis of the model was to pitch
worse-than-average financial status people with deals that
weren't very good for them but were very good for Amerisuffix.
The deals were generally not all that easy to sell but each was
very lucrative. My godson experimented with trying to give the
customers better deals, some of which already existed in Amerisuffix's
portfolio of options as fallback offers if the customer declined
the initial (getting râpéed) option, and some of which, I think, he
invented, and then aggressively pushing them to tout his services
by word of mouth. His core idea was this: that if you increased
volume while leaving a little on the table you'd initially break
even but over time, the word of mouth would bring you low-cost,
pre-enthused leads, so the dollar net would be positive. And the
moral-qualms net would be positive, too, for those salesfolk who
were capable of feeling them.

It looked like a win-win to The Big Train, and it was
apparently working. But within Amerisuffix,
specifically, The Big Train's plan looked like a failure of
character. Character was defined more as adherence-to-the
corporate-plan and less to increasing net, and I suspect but
don't know, that management also believed, regardless that he had
sold his plan as a revenue enhancement, that The Big Train was
having moral qualms which equated to a weakness of character.

I suspect that at Amerisuffix, the poster boy for
their version of character would also blow out of their system
pretty quickly, because at the extremes of their practices, their
behavior edged into the illegal. To succeed there, a person would
have to have a set of traits within an acceptable range shades of
grey, neither altar-boy nor Captain Barbossa.

(2) Because character is going to be defined subtly
differently in any organization (see Amerisuffix
above).

(3) Because appropriate "character" is going
to evolve over time so that whatever is now making you
stronger might kill you later.

(4) Because the balance of the shades of grey you have
in the workgroup is a dynamic, interactive recipe that
will either cause to you excel or undermine you. Optimal
"character" includes some unchanging elements and some
that evolve over time or need to be thrown away for occasional
circumstances.

Leo Durocher once said, "Nice guys finish last". He
was wrong and he was right. He was right in that a team of
"nice guys" wouldn't, in the long run, win in baseball
or most endeavors. Neither would a team of Leo Durochers...he wasn't very talented within his major league
peer group, and an entire roster of irascible dirt-kicking
roller-derby folk fight strong quaquaversal gravity fields that
tend to make them drift apart and lose cohesion. Leo himself was
a critical ingredient with many of the teams he played on -- the
components of his "character" made the overall
competitiveness of specific teams better even though the
ingredient as a standalone is not much of a virtue (like baking
powder in a cake recipe). With two Leos, you might take off,
while three or five might cause you to implode.

Hiring, as the Harvard study suggests likeable people is a
"nice guys" dead end. I've hired plenty of Leos in the
past...some work out fine, some blow up in my face, but if you consistently
bypass difficult, very-talented people in favor of likeable, adequate
people, you end up with a vapid group that can't do what it needs to
do to succeed when faced with adversity.

BEYOND BASEBALLSo, scarily to some, recognizing and acting on these four
truths are all necessistes, and yet they conflict with each
other. Yes, you need people who follow management's guidelines
almost all the time, but you need some who can transcend the
organization's rules to preserve the organization's survival, a
subtle and challenging set of grey areas best understood by
people who are in Kohlberg's stage five of moral development
(read the Heinz Dilemma story if you want to see how this most
closely relates).

If you can separate "character" from the more
squishy "likability", by all means, try to define
character and hire/fire based on it. Keep in mind you have to
define each trait, the minimum and maximum and norm you're
lookinmg for of each, and how many people who are outliers you
need and should limits yourself to. Applying the four necessities
above is a great way to start.

It's not that building a "character" team is not
worthwhile -- it is -- but building and maintaining a
"character" team is very challenging and requires a
very deft touch, the kind the 2005 White Sox front office and
manager and coaching staff had. Few organizations are as evolved
as baseball in having the courage and skills required to try and
win at it.

4/08/2006 02:19:00 PM posted by j @ 4/08/2006 02:19:00 PM

Sunday, April 02, 2006

When the Talent is the Product, Talent-Acquirers Determine the Inflatus Point

Almost without exception, the North American enterprises that
survive the next big competitive shakeout coming at the tail end
of this globalization cycle are going to be outfits that
recognize The Talent Is the Product. Baseball, as the U.S.' most
explicit model for strategy in competitive industries,
exemplifies this trend beautifully as I've said a bunch 'o times
including here and here and here.

There's a point I make with clients well beyond what I've
stated here in the past, and the baseball example burst forth
today like a frozen rope off the bat of Roberto Petagine. The USS Mariner
weblog hosted a get-together today at the Mariners' Seattle
stadium and the keynote guest was team GM Bill Bavasi. He was
asked about scouting and how closely did he as a GM get involved
in the evaluation.

Bavasi reveres his team's scouting leads, Bob Fontaine and Bob
Engle. Bavasi quickly answered that his involvement is this: if
Fontaine asserts something, Bavasi accepts it as solid. He trusts
Fontaine's and Engle's judgment and doesn't meddle because they
know more in their specialty than he does.

Her then went on to say (paraphrased here) that people like he
and a few other top Mariner front office folk were executives,
and basically replaceable and that the real talent in the front
office resides in the scouts. It's a kind thing to say, perhaps a
little exaggerated, but it recognizes a key point.

When the Talent Is the
Product, the level of talent of the people acquiring the talent
strongly shapes your success.

HR or HC departments tend to be treated poorly. In my more
provocative moments, I've suggested straight-faced to some
corporate clients that the outsourcing cult's entire savage rite
was done simply to escape having to work with HR departments.
I've had a straight-faced nod in response. HR can be part of an
organization's problem, but for enterprises that plan on doing
well over the next eight or so years, good HR, great recruiting,
great talent acquisition (capturing and keeping and keeping
motivated) is as essential most everywhere as it is in baseball.

The talent of finding talent in a competitive endeavor is, as
Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, the "inflatus point",
where life is either breathed into the organization's core or
sucked, irrevocably, out of it. Think it
through -- Â¿If a baseball team's scouts aren't doing a great
job, how is the team going to acquire enough talent to compete
persistently? Â¿And in the same way, if organizations in
competitive fields have HR groups that aren't doing a great job,
how is the org. going to acquire enough talent to compete
persistently? If it can't be made to work in baseball, how do you
imagine it can be made to work in other competitive fields?

Running away screaming from HR is only a solution if
you can give it to some other group that can do a consistently
excellent job of it. Not likely, eh? There are some
exceptions...I've worked with client companies that had
individual managers who were exceptionally great, Carlos
Delgado-vian, in their ability to consistently deliver B+ or
better hires. But that skill gets compartmentalized to that
manager's group. Make your HR do the job as solidly, it would
permeate the entire organization's profile. Running away is not
the answer.Fixingng HR/HC is. And don't even think of
outsourcing recruiting -- Â¿How effectively competitive would a
team's scouting be if the organization's Fontaine or Engle also
worked for other teams? If they were good, you'd be diluting the
competitive advantage they could provide, and if they weren't,
there wouldn't be much competitive advantage to collect, and what
there was would be shared.

Do you have a Fontaine you can reliably trust, that is, are
you hiring the best and the brightest to own and execute your
recruiting from inside your shop? If not, how do you think you
can overcome that handicap? And what can you do to help them
achieve the success you need to thrive? Can you imagine what your
organization would look like if therer were a small handful of
Fontaines in your HR/HC group with the kind of authority Bavasi
entrusts to his organization's scouts?